The Big Apple goes small

Bill de Blasio would be the tallest mayor of New York City since John Lindsay — — with the smallest public profile to lead it since Abe Beame.

As the top vote-getter in Tuesday’s Democratic primary — and probably his party’s outright nominee if his 40 percent plurality holds up — de Blasio is the odds-on favorite to win the general election in November in a city that remains overwhelmingly Democratic, despite 20 years of Republican rule.

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How de Blasio won

Weiner concedes in New York City

But in contrast to Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and even his path-breaking mentor and former boss, David Dinkins, who became the city’s first black mayor in 1989, de Blasio is “Bill de who?”

For the first time since 1973, when Richard Nixon was president and Beame won office on the ill-starred slogan “He knows the buck” just as New York slouched toward fiscal disaster, the nation’s largest city is poised to have a mayor who is not a braying wisenheimer, not a precedent-shattering racial first, not a hard-charging crime-buster nor a quietly competent entrepreneur elected in the wake of the national disaster of Sept. 11 but a conventional, labor-loving urban liberal of the old school made new.

De Blasio’s election would be exactly as far away from Dinkins’s as Dinkins’s was from Lindsay’s in 1965 — or, to put it in cultural terms, as far away as “Cleopatra” was from “Gone With the Wind.” And it is de Blasio — not his second-place Democratic rival Bill Thompson, who is black — who is the true heir to Dinkins’s biracial coalition. De Blasio won more than half the black vote, which accounts for about 30 percent of the primary electorate. His rapid rise, fueled in part by Anthony Weiner’s equally sudden demise, represents the city’s reversion to its 20th-century partisan political norm, in which labor unions and liberal activists long played a large role. He had the strong backing of the local hospital workers’ union, while Thompson had the teachers.

“It’s the new Tammany Hall,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime New York consultant who spent part of this year working for Thompson. “The nationalities have changed. The racial and ethnic identities have changed. We’re back to control, not by the clubhouse but by unions and people who call themselves ‘progressive’ and use that as a cueing device to generate turnout. It’s the new church of progressive pluralism.”

“We shouldn’t be surprised,” added Mitchell Moss, a professor at New York University. “Neither Rudy Giuliani nor Mike Bloomberg built a Republican Party. They used the line to get elected. Without a natural successor to Bloomberg, the Democrats are back.”

De Blasio’s populist campaign theme of “two cities,” separate and unequal, was a sharper-edged update of Dinkins’s late 1980s invocation of New York as a “gorgeous mosaic.” It gained surprising traction this summer in a city that has, in fact, become increasingly polarized over Bloomberg’s approach to governing, including his police department’s aggressive stop and frisk policy that is now under federal court supervision.

It hardly seemed to matter that Bloomberg’s police commissioner and the architect of the stop and frisk initiative, Raymond Kelly, had the same job under Dinkins, a fellow Marine who held Kelly in something like awe and invariably referred to him as “Colonel.”

Indeed, de Blasio’s strategy of basing his campaign on ideological and class appeals marks a sharp break with the successful mayoralties in the 40 years since the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, when the Big Apple nearly went bust under the bland, diminutive Beame, a clubhouse Democratic regular who was, like de Blasio, from Brooklyn (though he was born in London and de Blasio in Manhattan).

Regardless of personality or party, Koch (a popular congressman who had battled the Manhattan Democratic machine), Giuliani (a crusading prosecutor) and Bloomberg (a billionaire businessman and the city’s richest resident) all campaigned on competence as the essential prerequisite for anyone who would presume to govern a metropolis once celebrated for being ungovernable. In all those years, only Dinkins won office on a platform of social justice and moral uplift at all like de Blasio’s.